The use of trellis encoding has provided substantial advantages in digital communication. The use of trellis encoding on the analog downstream channel of PCM modems should provide similar advantages. Unfortunately, the non-equal spacing of PCM symbols results in the errors being concentrated only in those symbols with small adjacent symbol spacing.
This unequal distribution of symbol errors per symbol spacing reduces the advantages of trellis encoding. The throughput loss of including trellis state information can be compensated by an increase of throughput due to the ability to communicate error-free in a higher noise environment. Also, the use of trellis encoding may not be compatible with the variety of transmit gain and spectral shaping proposed by others.
What is needed is a trellis encoding technique which uses a modified V.34 trellis encoding for use with the analog downstream of PCM modems.